svg-icon-gen 0.2.1

Convert SVG files into production-ready icon sets for Windows and macOS

🏷️ svg-icon-gen

A command-line tool that converts SVG files into production-ready icon sets for Windows and macOS, including automatic dark theme variants.

Output

For each input SVG (e.g. logo.svg), a subfolder named logo/ is created containing:

logo/
├── logo.ico                        # Windows light theme (multi-resolution: 16–256px)
├── logo_dark.ico                   # Windows dark theme
├── logo_mac_template.png           # macOS menu bar, black (system auto-adapts light/dark)
├── [e-mail]        # macOS menu bar, black, Retina
├── logo_mac_template_dark.png      # macOS menu bar, white (for Electron / non-native)
├── [e-mail]   # macOS menu bar, white, Retina
└── png/
    ├── light/
    │   ├── logo_16x16.png
    │   ├── logo_32x32.png
    │   └── ...up to 512x512
    └── dark/
        └── ...same sizes, inverted

Requirements

pip install cairosvg pillow

macOS: if cairosvg fails to install, run brew install cairo first. Windows: install the GTK3 runtime for Cairo support, or use WSL.

Usage

# Single file
python generate_icons.py logo.svg

# Multiple files
python generate_icons.py icon1.svg icon2.svg icon3.svg

# Glob (bash / zsh)
python generate_icons.py assets/*.svg

Options

Flag	Description
--ico-only	Generate ICO files only
--mac-only	Generate macOS Template icons only
--png-only	Generate PNG files only
--no-dark	Skip dark theme variants
--png-sizes SIZES	Comma-separated PNG sizes (default: 16,32,64,128,256,512)
--out-dir DIR	Root output directory (default: same directory as each SVG)

--ico-only, --mac-only, and --png-only are mutually exclusive.

Examples

# Only ICO, no dark variant, output to ./dist
python generate_icons.py *.svg --ico-only --no-dark --out-dir ./dist

# Custom PNG sizes
python generate_icons.py logo.svg --png-only --png-sizes 32,64,128

# macOS icons only, all SVGs in a folder
python generate_icons.py assets/*.svg --mac-only

Platform Notes

macOS

Files named *Template.png are automatically rendered by the system to match the current menu bar appearance — no code changes needed for light/dark mode support. The _dark white variants are intended for frameworks that do not support the Template convention:

Framework	Recommended file
SwiftUI / AppKit	*_mac_template.png only
Electron	Switch between black and white versions on nativeTheme.on('updated')
Tauri	Switch on tauri::api::app::appearance_changed

Windows

The system tray does not automatically invert icons. Detect the active theme at runtime and swap accordingly:

• Win32: listen for WM_SETTINGCHANGE, read HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Themes\Personalize\AppsUseLightTheme
• Electron: use nativeTheme.shouldUseDarkColors and call tray.setImage() on updates